SAP BO Strategy management and Enterprise Performance Management
SAP Business Objects implements strategy management and Enterprise Performance Management mainly through the following two products: SAP Strategy Manager (SSM) and Business Objects Performance Manager (PM) and also with Cartesis for financial dashboards and scorecards and XCelsius for interactive dashboards based on rather small data volumes.
Basically, the SAP roadmap shows that SAP Strategy Management (formerly known as Pilot Works) will be the replacement for the BusinessObjects Performance Management module.
Enterprise Performance and Strategy Management applications offer the following tools, applications and methods:
Balanced Scorecards (BSC) - a strategic performance management tool for indicating whether the goals, vision and strategy of a smaller-scale operational activities are aligned with the organization's big-scale objectives.
A typical Scorecard uses 4 general perspectives: Financial perspective, Customer perspective, Internal process perspective and employee perspective (also referred to as innovation and learning).
Key Performance Indicators (KPI) - based on a strategy map and strategic objectives, strategic performance metrics or KPIs are used to track performance and identify trends. The performance indicators are usually implementing the red-orange-green status notation and the underlying information is linked to reports containing related, more detailed information.
Dashboards - the whole business intelligence environment can be visualized with an intuitive interface with rich graphics capabilities to quickly create visually appealing dashboards. Dashboards are personalized which enables business users to self-assemble and customize the content to meet their expectations.
Initiatives view - which helps assign participants and owners to a given strategic objective and assign priorities to projects and their milestones.
Rules, warnings, events monitoring and suggestions help identify and react quickly on potential threats
The structure of an organization can be linked through scorecards and KPI's to a particular division or a single employee.